About Me

[in a cabin in the mountains, Jim wakes up and bangs his head on the table he was sleeping under]
Alex Rieger: Jim, are you alright?
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: Yeah...uh ... who are you?
Alex Rieger: I'm Alex. We're friends, we work together.
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: What? are we, lumberjacks?
Alex Rieger: No, we're cabdrivers.
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: I bet we don't do much business up here!

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Friday, June 07, 2013

At a lavish Wonsan guesthouse, Fujimoto prepared sushi for a group of executives who would be arriving on a yacht. Executive
is Fujimoto's euphemism for generals, party officials, or high-level
bureaucrats. In other words, Kim Jong-il's personal entourage. And guesthouse
is code for a series of palaces decorated with cold marble,
silver-braided bedspreads, ice purple paintings of kimilsungia blossoms,
and ceilings airbrushed with the cran-apple mist of sunset, as if
Liberace's jet had crashed into Lenin's tomb.

At two in the morning, the boat finally docked. Fujimoto began
serving sushi for men who obviously had been through a long party
already. He would come to realize these parties tended to be stacked one
atop another, sometimes four in a row, spreading out over days.

All the men wore military uniforms except for one imperious fellow in
a casual sports tracksuit. This man was curious about the fish. He
asked Fujimoto about the marbled, fleshy cuts he was preparing.
"That's toro," Fujimoto told him.

For the rest of the night, this man kept calling out, "Toro, one more!"

The next day, Fujimoto was talking to the mamasan of his hotel. She was holding a newspaper, the official Rodong Sinmun, and on the front page was a photo of the man in the tracksuit. Fujimoto told her this was the man he'd just served dinner.

"She started trembling," Fujimoto said of the moment he realized the man's true identity. "Then I started trembling..."